A day later, St Augustine’s successor, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, denounced anti-Semitism as “absolutely intolerable” and “a deep shame” before a multi-faith audience that included the Chief Rabbi. A long overdue gesture, to be sure, even if he refused to single out the Labour Party or the Left more generally. It is certainly far preferable to his immediate predecessor, Rowan Williams, who embraced the inevitability of Sharia law in Britain. But in the same breath as he anathematised anti-Semitism, Dr Welby denied its uniquely evil influence by aligning it with Islamophobia. He dismissed fellow Christians who warn against the dangers posed by radical Islam and the fact that British Muslims lead “parallel lives”. What motivated the Archbishop was, we may assume, the fear of offending Muslims, who are responsible for much of the rise in anti-Semitism, and the very Anglican preference for a “middle way”, an aversion to upsetting consensus. This is not quite the spirit of another Archbishop of Canterbury, St Thomas Becket, whose defiance of King Henry II cost him his life in 1170, when he was martyred in his own cathedral. Until the Reformation, Becket’s shrine was one of the greatest places of pilgrimage in Christendom. It might be said to have given birth to modern English literature, by providing the occasion for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. When some of Becket’s relics were brought back to Canterbury last month from Esztergom in Hungary, did it occur to the present Archbishop that one of the great sources of the Western political tradition has been the separation of church and state? Or that Becket died to preserve what he saw as the libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the church from secular authority? Such a separation of mosque and state is alien to Islam; even in Turkey, which has sought to imitate the West, political Islam has returned with a vengeance under Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Only in the West have liberty, democracy and the rule of law been able to emerge, limiting the powers of both ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Modern Western political theory and practice were only forged in the furnace of the Enlightenment, the greatest legacy of which is the United States. But these freedoms have their origin in biblical ideas, without which our political tradition would be cut off from its tap root. Clerics such as Archbishop Welby would do better to attend to the precipitous collapse of Christianity: in the last five years, the proportion in England describing themselves as having “no religion” has doubled from 25 per cent to nearly 50 per cent. What has changed is that those brought up as Christians are abandoning their given identity. London, as so often, is untypical: “nones” there number only 40 per cent. The reason is the high percentage of Muslims in the capital. The rapid hollowing out of English Christianity is mirrored elsewhere on the Continent. But the self-immolation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in Europe would sound the death knell for the whole of Western civilisation.